South Park Pillories Apple In Typically Raunchy Style

Steve Jobs turns up as a monstrous tyrant as Trey Parker and Matt Stone take Apple's recent privacy woes to a grotesque conclusion.

Apple has ridden a string of prescient product rollouts to market-beating financial success, but the company's recent privacy scandals and reputation for serving status-seeking customers haven't escaped the notice of the sacred cow-toppling creators of South Park.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone kicked off the 15th season of the Comedy Central animated series Wednesday with an episode based around Apple's iPad tablet and featuring Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a foul-mouthed, diabolical tyrant.

Apple has in recent days been caught up in a major controversy over its use of location tracking data on its iPhones and iPads. The company came under fire last week when two researchers publicized the existence of an unencrypted, hidden file on iPhones that stores location data taken from nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots. The cached data was also timestamped, backed up on iTunes and although associated with Apple's Location Services, could not be shut off by users when they opted out of the service.

Parker and Stone clearly moved fast to create the South Park episode, called "HUMANCENTiPAD" —the location tracking file has only been heavily publicized for about a week and Apple made its first public statement on the matter just yesterday.

But clearly the South Park creators were aware of the scandal when they made the episode. One character, distraught that his best friend has been kidnapped by fictional Apple goons, says that it's no use going to the police, because "when the police want to know where somebody is, they ask Apple."

Indeed, after the first news of the iPhone's location tracking file broke, it came to light that police had been using the data in criminal investigations for months.

One area where the South Park creators got it wrong, however, was in the depiction of a fictional tablet from Toshiba called the Handibook that's half the price of an iPad. One of the reasons for the iPad's continued success is that competitors have not managed to beat Apple on price in any significant way.

You can watch "HUMANCENTiPAD" here—but be warned, it's pretty disgusting.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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